Happy New Year and many thanks to Andrew, Zeke and others who make Climate Brink happen. I read my fair share of climate blogs and CB is one of the best for scientifically rigorous insight to identify the signal in all the noise. Climate change is complicated and most people don't have the confidence, time, and or resources to keep track of the often confusing and something confounding details (with lots of help from the climate change denial - fossil fuel preservation crowd).
And special thanks for this bon mot -- "When a non-negligible fraction of society responds to a virus pandemic by eating horse paste instead of getting a safe and effective vaccine, it’s easy to see how it could all be over for humanity in a 1,000 years, if not sooner." One of Andrews best pithy summations of our situation.
Pulling no punches for the economists :) ....“We also need to deal with threats of nuclear war, pandemics, economists, and many potential disasters”....
Thanks for explaining Fermi's paradox and how it fits into our alarming conundrum and the predicament we have created. We are beyond fortunate to be part of such an amazing and beautiful and unique planet with all its diversity of life. How tragic that we are on our way to making it uninhabitable for our selves, but also for so many other amazing co-inhabitants of our ecosystem
As in a reply below, civilizations elsewhere might share our quirks.
Dig up the stored energy from plant life and have a spectacular boom for a couple of centuries, then a period where the wealthy and well-educated are digging bunkers, as Mark Zuckerberg is right now.
It's possible intelligence would evolve along similar lines everywhere - it's a means of prediction (more efficient) as Sterling points out, and a means of social organization. And it would have major bugs at planet-scale, because it wouldn't have evolved to *be* planet-scale.
This is a fascinating look at the window of time between digging up the fossil fuel and screwing up everything else:
The equation doesn’t seem to include a factor that covers the unlikelihood of one civilization’s brief RF period overlapping another’s. We’ve been using radio frequencies for ~100 years and are already reducing the planet’s signal strength (the only way to notice each other at stellar distances) as fiber and low-power satellite bandwidth takes over. RF broadcasting rapid reductions to ~zero would also have occurred during any other advanced civilization’s lifetime. Even a few 200-year-long RF-flash overlaps during the 13 billion years in which such civilizations might have briefly appeared seem vanishingly unlikely, and we’d have missed any chances here until our first radio telescopes appeared 87 years ago.
We’re effectively alone in the universe, and the horse-paste eaters are lurching us toward an existential crisis unless we devote ourselves now to preventing the Orange Menace’s return. Priorities, please.
Let’s click Pause on most everything else until November.
Having hopefully handled that overarching emergency, revising our society and planet to work for most everyone then becomes a top-line priority.
The important question is not about life with intelligence, it is about
1. sentience,
2.sentience where individuals feel preferences, "good" versus "bad," beneficial vs. harmful for the individual," and
3. how the sentient being feels preferences, is "bad" perceived as suffering, pain or other forms of more or less intense discomfort, versus "good" being perceived as a good feeling.
That we may destroy all civilizations is not the point. As sentient beings, extreme suffering is the most real thing - it is horrible and nothing can really compensate for it.
Compassionate humans want to aggressively work to reveres global warming (rather than lamely - prioritizing financial institutions' and corporations' interests more than making rapid progress towards decreasing CO2 levels) exactly because the way we seem to end all civilizations is so cruel - causing unimaginable suffering.
Since the world has been naturally so full of suffering, and cruel, sadistic, or blindly culture-bound humans often added most cruel treatments to the natural pains of people, I only hope there is no other life form in the universe where many suffer like so many humans did and still do.
Hi Andrew, climate scientists have for decades been fighting the lies, lobbying power, money and might of the fossil fuel industry. You should know what it's like.
However, to a person, you have pushed back against scientists fighting the lies, lobbying power, money and might of Big Pharma and regulation.
Scientists have transferrable skills of critical analysis. They shouldn't be restricted to one area and be blind to all others.
In March 2022, the New England Journal of Medicine published a report entitled "Effect of Early Treatment with Ivermectin among Patients with Covid-19." The report is an example of research results being deliberately ignored to fit a political (not medical) agenda.
Here's what the report concluded: "Treatment with ivermectin did not result in a lower incidence of medical admission to a hospital due to progression of Covid-19 or of prolonged emergency department observation among outpatients with an early diagnosis of Covid-19." Pretty clear-cut, one would think, except that the actual results show that Ivermectin did result in a lower incidence of medical admissions to hospital and reduced the length of time in hospital.
Because it's not possible to include images in these comments, I need to refer to the table in the report which show benefits from the use of Ivermectin, namely, Table 3 which shows small but observable benefits (and certainly no adverse results) from the use of Ivermectin.
I console myself that Peter Doshi, one of the senior editors at the BMJ, also bemoans that lack of critical analysis skills both in medical students and everyone else. He would call himself an anti-vaxxer as the term now applies to those who oppose vaccine mandates as a condition of employment.
In March 2023 he wrote about biases in observational studies on vaccine efficacy which can make a hypothetical but completely ineffective vaccine have an efficacy of eg 48% . His conclusion 'A recent commentary discussed multiple factors that can bias estimates of covid-19 vaccine effectiveness, such as vaccination status misclassification, testing differences, and disease risk factor confounding.7 Our article complements these observations by providing examples based on actual data sets that quantify how case-counting window bias, age bias, and background infection rate bias can profoundly complicate the analysis of observational studies, shifting covid-19 vaccine effectiveness estimates by an absolute magnitude as high as 50% to 70%. Randomised trials aim to mitigate these biases by virtue of design features, such as randomisation, placebo controls, and blinding. But while randomised trials should offer far superior protection against these biases, premarketing trials left many important questions unstudied, such as the durability of protection, interaction with other countermeasures, and effectiveness in highest-risk and other important subpopulations. Pragmatic, placebo-controlled randomised trials might have addressed some of these limitations, but after manufacturers began unblinding their trials following the emergency use authorisation in December 2020, observational studies are all we have.
Our analysis shows that real-world conditions such as non-randomised vaccination, crossovers, and trends in background infection rates introduce strong, complex biases into these observational datasets. Our contribution is to size up three important biases, the magnitude of which surprised us and may surprise you. We conclude that “real-world” studies using methodologies popular in early 2021 overstate vaccine effectiveness.
Fossil fuels have certainly been "good" for Homo sapiens up to a point but would it be necessary for so many other potential civilisations to be going through what we are? There seems to be several examples of early electric car development in the US in the late 19th & early 20th century and London had an electric (lead acid battery) bus service for a while in the first decade of the 20th. If technological development had been slightly different maybe we would not be facing the current crisis.
Happy New Year and many thanks to Andrew, Zeke and others who make Climate Brink happen. I read my fair share of climate blogs and CB is one of the best for scientifically rigorous insight to identify the signal in all the noise. Climate change is complicated and most people don't have the confidence, time, and or resources to keep track of the often confusing and something confounding details (with lots of help from the climate change denial - fossil fuel preservation crowd).
And special thanks for this bon mot -- "When a non-negligible fraction of society responds to a virus pandemic by eating horse paste instead of getting a safe and effective vaccine, it’s easy to see how it could all be over for humanity in a 1,000 years, if not sooner." One of Andrews best pithy summations of our situation.
Economists 🤣
Pulling no punches for the economists :) ....“We also need to deal with threats of nuclear war, pandemics, economists, and many potential disasters”....
Thanks for explaining Fermi's paradox and how it fits into our alarming conundrum and the predicament we have created. We are beyond fortunate to be part of such an amazing and beautiful and unique planet with all its diversity of life. How tragic that we are on our way to making it uninhabitable for our selves, but also for so many other amazing co-inhabitants of our ecosystem
The Mayans and Incas asked precisely the same question. They were much happier not knowing the answer.
As in a reply below, civilizations elsewhere might share our quirks.
Dig up the stored energy from plant life and have a spectacular boom for a couple of centuries, then a period where the wealthy and well-educated are digging bunkers, as Mark Zuckerberg is right now.
Here's a good talk from Peter Sterling at U Penn,
https://youtu.be/cGZ53ecu8Jk?si=Lq-ItYk2nQI7ZvnF
And one from Robert Trivers,
https://youtu.be/JvX3wTjygkg?si=U5XNegxZnc_0rZQw
It's possible intelligence would evolve along similar lines everywhere - it's a means of prediction (more efficient) as Sterling points out, and a means of social organization. And it would have major bugs at planet-scale, because it wouldn't have evolved to *be* planet-scale.
This is a fascinating look at the window of time between digging up the fossil fuel and screwing up everything else:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2022.0029
h/t aarnegranlund.bsky.social
The equation doesn’t seem to include a factor that covers the unlikelihood of one civilization’s brief RF period overlapping another’s. We’ve been using radio frequencies for ~100 years and are already reducing the planet’s signal strength (the only way to notice each other at stellar distances) as fiber and low-power satellite bandwidth takes over. RF broadcasting rapid reductions to ~zero would also have occurred during any other advanced civilization’s lifetime. Even a few 200-year-long RF-flash overlaps during the 13 billion years in which such civilizations might have briefly appeared seem vanishingly unlikely, and we’d have missed any chances here until our first radio telescopes appeared 87 years ago.
We’re effectively alone in the universe, and the horse-paste eaters are lurching us toward an existential crisis unless we devote ourselves now to preventing the Orange Menace’s return. Priorities, please.
Let’s click Pause on most everything else until November.
Having hopefully handled that overarching emergency, revising our society and planet to work for most everyone then becomes a top-line priority.
Let me share this poem here by our one and only Szymborska (I am Polish). I hope you find it not only perfect but also apt.
Nothing twice
Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.
Even if there is no one dumber,
if you're the planet's biggest dunce,
you can't repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once.
No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with precisely the same kisses.
One day, perhaps some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.
The next day, though you're here with me,
I can't help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is it a flower or a rock?
Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.
With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we're different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.
translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak
Adam Frank has done a lot of interesting research about the potential of exo-civilizations also having to deal with climate change. I summarized his main ideas a while ago here: https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/the-universal-anthropocene
The important question is not about life with intelligence, it is about
1. sentience,
2.sentience where individuals feel preferences, "good" versus "bad," beneficial vs. harmful for the individual," and
3. how the sentient being feels preferences, is "bad" perceived as suffering, pain or other forms of more or less intense discomfort, versus "good" being perceived as a good feeling.
That we may destroy all civilizations is not the point. As sentient beings, extreme suffering is the most real thing - it is horrible and nothing can really compensate for it.
Compassionate humans want to aggressively work to reveres global warming (rather than lamely - prioritizing financial institutions' and corporations' interests more than making rapid progress towards decreasing CO2 levels) exactly because the way we seem to end all civilizations is so cruel - causing unimaginable suffering.
Since the world has been naturally so full of suffering, and cruel, sadistic, or blindly culture-bound humans often added most cruel treatments to the natural pains of people, I only hope there is no other life form in the universe where many suffer like so many humans did and still do.
Heinz Aeschbach, MD humanecivilization.org
"And there seems to be no sign of intelligent life anywhere."
- Buzz Lightyear
Tom Murphy, physicist at UCSD, mentions the Fermi Paradox towards the end of his free online book on energy (which looks great, btw, reading it now):
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m#page=331
Hi Andrew, climate scientists have for decades been fighting the lies, lobbying power, money and might of the fossil fuel industry. You should know what it's like.
However, to a person, you have pushed back against scientists fighting the lies, lobbying power, money and might of Big Pharma and regulation.
Scientists have transferrable skills of critical analysis. They shouldn't be restricted to one area and be blind to all others.
They should also be respectful to each other.
In March 2022, the New England Journal of Medicine published a report entitled "Effect of Early Treatment with Ivermectin among Patients with Covid-19." The report is an example of research results being deliberately ignored to fit a political (not medical) agenda.
Here's what the report concluded: "Treatment with ivermectin did not result in a lower incidence of medical admission to a hospital due to progression of Covid-19 or of prolonged emergency department observation among outpatients with an early diagnosis of Covid-19." Pretty clear-cut, one would think, except that the actual results show that Ivermectin did result in a lower incidence of medical admissions to hospital and reduced the length of time in hospital.
Because it's not possible to include images in these comments, I need to refer to the table in the report which show benefits from the use of Ivermectin, namely, Table 3 which shows small but observable benefits (and certainly no adverse results) from the use of Ivermectin.
I console myself that Peter Doshi, one of the senior editors at the BMJ, also bemoans that lack of critical analysis skills both in medical students and everyone else. He would call himself an anti-vaxxer as the term now applies to those who oppose vaccine mandates as a condition of employment.
In March 2023 he wrote about biases in observational studies on vaccine efficacy which can make a hypothetical but completely ineffective vaccine have an efficacy of eg 48% . His conclusion 'A recent commentary discussed multiple factors that can bias estimates of covid-19 vaccine effectiveness, such as vaccination status misclassification, testing differences, and disease risk factor confounding.7 Our article complements these observations by providing examples based on actual data sets that quantify how case-counting window bias, age bias, and background infection rate bias can profoundly complicate the analysis of observational studies, shifting covid-19 vaccine effectiveness estimates by an absolute magnitude as high as 50% to 70%. Randomised trials aim to mitigate these biases by virtue of design features, such as randomisation, placebo controls, and blinding. But while randomised trials should offer far superior protection against these biases, premarketing trials left many important questions unstudied, such as the durability of protection, interaction with other countermeasures, and effectiveness in highest-risk and other important subpopulations. Pragmatic, placebo-controlled randomised trials might have addressed some of these limitations, but after manufacturers began unblinding their trials following the emergency use authorisation in December 2020, observational studies are all we have.
Our analysis shows that real-world conditions such as non-randomised vaccination, crossovers, and trends in background infection rates introduce strong, complex biases into these observational datasets. Our contribution is to size up three important biases, the magnitude of which surprised us and may surprise you. We conclude that “real-world” studies using methodologies popular in early 2021 overstate vaccine effectiveness.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jep.13839
Fossil fuels have certainly been "good" for Homo sapiens up to a point but would it be necessary for so many other potential civilisations to be going through what we are? There seems to be several examples of early electric car development in the US in the late 19th & early 20th century and London had an electric (lead acid battery) bus service for a while in the first decade of the 20th. If technological development had been slightly different maybe we would not be facing the current crisis.